African states agree in 1963 that the colonial borders are permanent

The borders of independent Africa were drawn in European capitals between the 1880s and the 1900s, and they cut through communities that shared a language, a history and a set of relatives. Peoples with no reason to form one state were expected to run one at once. When African leaders founded the Organisation of African Unity in 1963 they wrote the permanence of those borders into it, reasoning that opening any single line to argument would open all of them and produce a generation of war. The same governments inherited a colonial state built on force and answerable to nobody, and they used it as they found it. Parliaments with several parties were discarded quickly as unworkable, and by the early 1970s the single party state was normal, with Tanzania and Zambia keeping a limited local vote while most of the rest could only be changed by soldiers. The Big Man at the head of the one party held people by handing out money and posts, which is how ambitious men had built followings a century before.

Early in 1964 army officers began passing round petitions asking that Francois Duvalier hold the presidency for life. A commission produced the text. It gave him the office for as long as he lived and the power to name his successor, and it called him the Sovereign throughout. He installed himself on 1 April and explained that a revolutionary of his kind turns up once in fifty or seventy five years. The ballots handed to voters were printed in advance with the word Oui on them. Two point eight million came back in favour. Three thousand two hundred and thirty four people found a way to vote against, and most of them were arrested for defacing a ballot. Official decrees began capitalising the pronouns that referred to him. A magazine ran a picture of Christ with a hand on Duvalier's shoulder, captioned as a statement that this was the chosen one. Paul Blanchet issued a catechism in which the five founders of Haiti were declared to be one man, and the man was the president.

Between 1979 and 1981 as many as seventy thousand Haitians entered Florida by boat. Many of the vessels were small open sailing craft, the kanot used for fishing. Richman notes that during the 1970s a higher share of the Caribbean population emigrated than that of any other region of the world. The traffic stopped almost at once when Washington acted. Coast Guard cutters were stationed in the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti to intercept the boats and burn them, to weigh claims for political asylum and to send back everyone found ineligible. Virtually every claim was rejected. Arrivals fell to a dribble through 1982 and did not resume with any regularity for nine years. The people who had landed found work almost nowhere except migratory farm labour, settling in Belle Glade, Immokalee and Fort Pierce to cut sugar cane and pack vegetables, and moving each summer with labour contractors to the farms of the middle Atlantic coast.

By 1980 some two hundred thousand Haitians were living in the Dominican Republic, some for a season and some for good. Movement across that border is old and has taken three forms. The first people to go were maroons, escaping slavery on the French side during the colonial period for the Spanish side, where treatment was often better. After independence in 1804 the pattern changed. Haitian occupation of the Spanish part of the island and the invasion attempts that followed emptied the border districts on the eastern side, and Haitians filled the space. The third and largest movement came from sugar. American and other foreign firms built plantations and mills in the Dominican Republic towards the end of the nineteenth century and could not find enough local labour. In the 1950s the two governments signed an agreement that formalised the traffic. Observers compared the cane workers' conditions to slavery, and expected earnings there still beat those on a Haitian farm.